OpIsrael Confirms the Cyber-space is the Fifth Domain of War

The Israeli Cyber Space is under attack by Anonymous hackers in retaliation for the Israeli operation “Pillar of Defence“. The military operation began on Wednesday with the killing of Ahmed Al-Jaabari, the commander of the military wing of Hamas, whose car has been hit by an Israeli Missile

If Hamas’s armed wing, immediately after the attack, replied that “The occupation has opened the gates of hell”, the ongoing wave of cyber-attacks against Israeli sites initiated by the Anonymous collective (under the so-called OpIsrael), has analogously opened the gates of hell in the cyber-space.

So far the Anonymous claim that more than 660 websites have been defaced and nearly 90 completely deleted (including the Bank Of Jerusalem), and the list keeps on growing as the cyber-offensive continues (just follow the #OpIsrael hashtag on Twitter). Israel is suffering a growing number of DDoS and SQLi attacks against governmental, retail, and business targets resulting in sites down, data dump and, in the worst cases, databases completely erased. Interestingly, this wave of cyber-attacks has also deserved the attention of the “semi-official” Iranian news agency Fars News, which has dedicated an article to the Anonymous Hacks.

Definitely the cyber-space is the fifth domain of war and this sad circumstance is confirming this assertion, not so much for the cyber-attacks (Anonymous cannot be considered an army), but mostly for other aspects typical of real wars that has been applied to the cyber-space.

In response to the Israeli threat to cut Internet off from Gaza, the Anonymous have put together the Anonymous Gaza Care Package a kind of first-aid kit containing instructions in Arabic and English to survive an Internet teardown and to evade IDF surveillance.

On the opposite side, the Israeli Defence Force has released a tool on its blog, called IDF Ranks, that rewards with badges frequent visitors who interact with the site. The scope, according to IDF, is “to help fight the misinformation about Israel and the IDF online”. A clear attempt to use the cyber-space for propaganda.